Tkinter Tutorial - Scrollbar

Jinku Hu Jun 25, 2020 Dec 07, 2019

Tkinter Tkinter Scrollbar

Tkinter ScrollBar
Tkinter Horizontal Scrollbar

The Tkinter Scrollbar widget is normally used to scroll widgets like ListBox, Text or Canvas vertically, or Entry horizontally. It shows a slider in the right position.

Tkinter ScrollBar

import tkinter as tk

class Scrollbar_Example:
    def __init__(self):
        self.window = tk.Tk()

        self.scrollbar = tk.Scrollbar(self.window)
        self.scrollbar.pack(side="right", fill="y")

        self.listbox = tk.Listbox(self.window, yscrollcommand=self.scrollbar.set)
        for i in range(100):
            self.listbox.insert("end", str(i))
        self.listbox.pack(side="left", fill="both")

        self.scrollbar.config(command=self.listbox.yview)

        self.window.mainloop()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app = Scrollbar_Example()

Tkinter Scrollbar Basic

self.scrollbar = tk.Scrollbar(self.window)

It initiates the Scrollbar instance.

self.listbox = tk.Listbox(self.window, yscrollcommand=self.scrollbar.set)
.
.
self.scrollbar.config(command=self.listbox.yview)

We need configure both Listbox and Scrollbar to connect them together correctly.

Set yscrollcommand callback to set of Scrollbar. yscrollcommand is scrollable widgets’ option that is controlled by a scrollbar, and is used to communicted with vertical scrollbars.
Set command of the Scrollbar to the yview of the Listbox. When the user moves the slider of Scrollbar, it calls the yview method with the proper argument.

Tkinter Horizontal Scrollbar

The horizontal scroll bar is used to scroll the widgets like Text and Entry in the horizontal orientation.

import tkinter as tk

class Scrollbar_Example:
    def __init__(self):
        self.window = tk.Tk()

        self.scrollbar = tk.Scrollbar(self.window, orient=tk.HORIZONTAL)
        self.scrollbar.pack(side="bottom", fill="x")

        self.text = tk.Text(self.window,
                            wrap = "none",
                            xscrollcommand=self.scrollbar.set)
        
        self.text.insert("end", str(dir(tk.Scrollbar)))
        self.text.pack(side="top", fill="x")

        self.scrollbar.config(command=self.text.xview)

        self.window.mainloop()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app = Scrollbar_Example()

Tkinter Scrollbar Horizontal

self.scrollbar = tk.Scrollbar(self.window, orient=tk.HORIZONTAL)

It initiates a horizontal scroll bar by specifying the orient to be HORIZONTAL.

self.text = tk.Text(self.window,
                            wrap = "none",
                            xscrollcommand=self.scrollbar.set)

To scroll the text horizontally, we need to set xscrollcommand to the set method of the Scrollbar, but not yscrollcommand as in the above example.

self.scrollbar.config(command=self.text.xview)

Correspondingly, the callback of the horizontal scroll bar should be connected with the xview method but not yview.

Author: Jinku Hu

Founder of DelftStack.com. Jinku has worked in the robotics and automotive industries for over 8 years. He sharpened his coding skills when he needed to do the automatic testing, data collection from remote servers and report creation from the endurance test. He is from an electrical/electronics engineering background but has expanded his interest to embedded electronics, embedded programming and front-/back-end programming.